I'm building a multi-tenant Laravel application. One of the requirements of the project is that every client can have their own theme based on their corporate guidelines. By default a few css adjustments will suffice, but some clients request a completely different template.

Conditionally loading a different stylesheet per client is pretty trivial, but in order to use a completely different view per theme you quickly end up typing the same thing over and over across various parts of your application.

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We just open sourced our company guidelines site! We previously kept the contents in a private wiki on GitHub, but I'm glad we finally put the time in giving the contents a real home.

Like our docs site, the content is stored in markdown files, which can directly be edited on GitHub. The site deploys whenever something's pushed to the master branch.

As for why we decided to open source it all...

This site contains a set of guidelines we use to bring our projects to a good end. We decided to document our workflow because consistency is one of the most valuable traits of maintainable software.

The contents of this site exist for ourselves—more importantly, our future selves—and for giving future collegues a reference to our way of doing things and their quirks. The guidelines cover workflow, code style, and other little things we consider worth documenting.

The guidelines are available on guidelines.spatie.be.

A lot has been going in in JavaScript the past few years. One of my favorite things has been the usage of babel, which allows us to write future JavaScript syntax today. The babel ecosystem has tons of plugins and configuration options, I'd like to elaborate on our usage at Spatie.

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This week I needed to export some charts generated with HTML & JavaScript as a pdf file. I already had implemented the charts on a webpage so I wanted a solution that allowed me to use my existing code for the pdfs.

Headless Chrome to the rescue! Chrome can run as a cli tool, and print a pdf file from a url. All I had to do was make some layout tweaks to make everything printer-friendly.

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Today I was writing a form component that needed an optional back button. Since the form component is generic, the back button could point to anything.

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Christopher Pitt wrote a pretty comprehensive article on one of our latest packages, which is one of my favorite packages I've written at Spatie to date, phpunit-snapshot-assertions.

Ah-ha moments are beautiful and rare in programming. Every so often, we’re fortunate enough to discover some trick or facet of a system that forever changes how we think of it. For me, that’s what snapshot testing is.

Read the full article on SitePoint, or check out phpunit-snapshot-assertions on GitHub.

In a recent Twitter thread, Sebastian McKenzie (Yarn and Babel author) shared his thoughts on the current state of open source. This tweet stood out for me (and he later ironically dubbed it his "most thoughtleader tweet ever"):

Revel in fragmentation and duplication because without it there's stagnation and it stifles innovation.

When someone shares their latest pet project library, it's often met with responses like "What a waste of time, you can already do this with library X!".

There's no need for justification here. Maybe the author wants something that fully matches their use case instead of the 80% that library X does, maybe they want a different internal architecture. Maybe they have bigger future plans in mind, or most importantly, maybe they just want to experiment, learn, and have fun.

Read the entire thread on @sebmck's Twitter.

Quick Vue tip for package authors! If you publish a package that exposes multiple Vue components, you can write a small plugin to install them all at once.

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Since writing this post, TypeScript has become officially supported in Laravel Mix (version 0.12 and up). There's still some informative stuff in here if you're new to TypeScript, but use the official method if you're on a newer version of Mix!

In a recent Spatie project we decided to give TypeScript a shot for the business critical part of a new application. TypeScript provides static analysis to reduce the chance of introducing bugs, to have self-documenting code, and to improve our tooling (autocompletion!)

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PHP 7.1 introduced a new syntax for the list() function. I've never really seen too much list() calls in the wild, but it enables you to write some pretty neat stuff.

This post is a primer of list() and it's PHP 7.1 short notation, and an overview of some use cases I've been applying them to.

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A little bash script to run tests when a file has been changed.

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The gist of snapshot testing is asserting that a set of data hasn't changed compared to a previous version, which is a snapshot of the data, to prevent regressions. The difference between a classic and an is that you don't write the expectation yourself when snapshot testing.

When a snapshot assertion happens for the first time, it creates a snapshot file with the actual output, and marks the test as incomplete. Every subsequent run will compare the output with the existing snapshot file to check for regressions.

Snapshot testing is most useful larger datasets that can change over time, like serializing an object for an XML export or a JSON API endpoint.

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When admins create or update a news item—or any other entity—in our homegrown CMS, a url slug is generated based on it's title. The downside here is that when the title changes, the old url would break. If we wouldn't regenerate the url on updates, edited titles would still have an old slug in the url, which isn't an ideal situation either.

Our solution: add a unique identifier to the url that will never change, while keeping the slug intact. This creates links that are both readable and unbreakable.

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Vue 2.0 introduced it's own virtual DOM implementation. At first sight, this doesn't seem to have a large effect on the way you write templates.

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When building a website for a client that wants to be able to manage content, Laravel's language files aren't ideal since you can't edit them without diving into a bundle of text files. We recently decided to drop all the lang files in our custom CMS in favor of persisting translations in the database, which allows us to build a custom interface for managing them.

This post is a quick overview on overwriting Laravel's default translation loader, which means you can keep using the lang method while fetching the translations from a database. Writing a custom loader is easier than it sounds. First we'll set up our translation models, then we'll write our loader, and finally register it in our application.

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